Real Time Congress is a fast and free app to access real-time information about U.S. Congress on iPhone.

Lobbyists have spent lots of money to get access to real-time information on Congress, and it’s a divide that helped them be more powerful than most citizens. Now, the Sunlight Labs new Real Time Congress App put Congress informations into anyone’s hands all the time, making public empowerment real.

« Our goal at the Sunlight Foundation is to change the way that citizens collect information about their government, and then help them to use that information to change the way they interact with their government. This new app shows how powerful new programs and smart phones can accomplish that goal. »

Real Time Congress for the iPhone – and assimilated “Congress” for Android – are two examples of how powerful mobile applications can be in shifting the traditional balance of power.

« We want to make data about what’s happening inside Congress more available to the public. It isn’t just who your member of Congress is that matters, but also what they do. It’s also important to see what they’re reading and who they’re listening to, and what the process looks like.

The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate, notices, and key government documents as they are released with features such as:

Updates from the House and Senate floor as they happen.

Critical reports and memos as they are published online by officials

Daily and weekly notices

Schedule of upcoming committee hearings from House and Senate

Brad Bauman, a former congressional communications director, wrote:

« The Real Time Congress application will keep journalists, Hill staffers, bloggers and interested citizens up to date on what is happening in Congress, in real-time. Its ease of use and sleek design promise that end users will continue to go back to the app for unfiltered information on Congress so they can make their own informed decisions on what is happening in the Capitol. »

For now, all this information is displayed quite simply. There is no deep personalization, no search features and push notifications. Sunlight Labs will continue to improve on the app with user feedbacks.

Still, this kind of app will definitely change the way citizens collect information about their government – and maybe how they are able to use that information to engage with government in new and more effective ways.

Yesterday, UMP french leading-party secretary, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, introduced UMP new socialmedia: “Les créateurs de possible“.The idea of this platform is to make it possible for every citizen to purpose, discuss, and get involved in community projects.« Creators of opportunity», as it may be approximatively translated, is a Do It Yourself project launched by the french right-wing party. This platform of a new kind in France will be online in the following 24 hours.

Creators of opportunity is:

A mash up of socialmedia to serve community

A community open to all the citizens

A simple design with easy ergonomics and traditional functions of a social network

A free speech space with no moderation a priori (except for discriminative contents)

A community where UMP logo does not appear (but the platform logo looks similar)

Eventhough the presentation is not complete as I could not access the platform, this initiative has been underlined as « very risky » during its presentation.

Organized well, it would be easy for a bunch of opponents to transform this platform into a big mess.

The no-yet-existing digital identification would indeed allow anyone to use fake identities and post any irrelevant comment and there will be only 3 staff members to moderate 35 million potential french websurfers.

The Challenge

Maybe the purpose of this website (again, still to be seen) is not to recolt such a great amount of feedbacks. Maybe it could never be so popular anyway as french people have not answered yet the question:

Are you willing to animate a platform launched by a political party when his leader, french President Nicolas Sarkozy gets less than 40% of favorable opinion on national polls?

Of course, UMP presence on this platform seems to be insidious but confusion remains.

Is it a national platform for all citizens to solve problems conjointly ? Or is it a partisan website to launch partisane

projects ?

The UMP and its leader ‘popularity is not at its top and Sarkozy is not known as a man uniting people in real life. For these two reasons -at least- pretend to be able to bond french people on the web is indeed, so risky.

That is why one may regret that NKM, by the way mainly known as Secretary of State in charge of developping digital economy in France, created such an interesting tool for a « party concern only » instead of creating it for a national purpose.

At the meantime, French people are launching a « No-Sarkozy-day » on the net.

Déjà vu

On the other side of the (political) border, we can’t help but thinking about Segolene Royal « Desir d’avenir » platform. Segolene Royal is the french left-wing politician who ended 2nd to the run for presidency in 2007. She actually announced on december 28th that her collaborative website was turning into a platform of solidarity, « a fraternity and solidarity-based website to give a hand on each other projects ». Platforms are being very trendy lately.

Concerning oversea empowerment projects, we could cite the City of Manor (TX) and its launching of « Manor Lab » that allows citizens to purpose and vote for local projects.http://www.manorlabs.org/

Without mentioning all the citizen applications for iphone developped by cities such as New York, Washington, Portland, San Francisco and so on to emphasize interaction and community involvement. Not mentioning neither “Smarter government” project in the UK and “Engage” program in Australia.

Future

So we finally made a point. But we still have time to make up on gov20 so let’s hope that this participative platform – as a first step- will turn to be successful, for an emerging edemocracy and gov20 in France and for the greater transparency that should inevitably follow.

are two projects that use mobile phones to measure, record and map instances of noise pollution.

By installing a free application that measures the noise level wherever they are, users will record informations such as description of the noise, its source, the time of day, etc and they will then mapped onto city maps.

However, for projects like these, participation is key and not yet developpped. Another challenge is the fact that both programs are smart-phone dependent and only 30% of french population has one.

Of course, we always have the same question with social apps: once noise pollution would be mapped, who will invent the tool that will transform this mapping into corrective action ?